Melody retrieval and composer attribution using sequence alignment on RISM incipits.

Abstract

The RISM A/II database contains metadata and incipits of more than a million compositions. The Monochord search engine can retrieve incipits that are similar to a query using several alignment methods based on pitch raters, weightbased raters and duration-based raters. The performance of all 27 search methods is evaluated using Mean Average Precision metrics and the TREC framework for retrieval performance analysis. The difference in exact pitch between melodies turns out to be the best factor to search with for musical similarity retrieval. All melodies have metadata such as a composer name, but a portion of the database is labelled as Anonymus. A k-Nearest Neighbours algorithm is optimised for the purpose of deanonymisation and used to classify several Anonymus songs to test the applicability of this classifier for composer labelling. Using a classifier as a first selection step for deanonymisation purposes turns out to be viable with human correction.